Wait till you see our Windows Phones with the Apollo update, touts Nokia
Nokia's Niklas Savander sat down for an interview and disclosed that when the company started working on its Windows Phone handsets, the Mango update was pretty much done and dusted, so it could only insert fringe changes to set its phones apart, like the new features we reviewed yesterday, in order to keep fragmentation at bay.
There are two more updates in store for next year, though - Tango, which will bring LTE and lower resolution supports to Windows Phone for cheaper handsets, and the big gun Apollo, which should usher us in the era of multicore and HD displays. Apollo is rumored to end up being called Windows Phone 8, in order to emphasize its interoperability with the Windows 8 platform for tablets.
There, Niklas Savander points out, Nokia has carte blanche to work with Microsoft on differentiating features from the ground-up, and help Redmond lower the price of phones with its mobile OS:
We have a contractual 'wiggle-room' [with Microsoft], one of the things we're working on with them is getting the price points of the phones down, we have a lot of engineering expertise they don't have, and that's going to serve us well.
Two phones is absolutely not enough in the market; it's a good start, but there are new markets we need to conquer, and this [the Nokia Lumia 800 and 710] is the beginning of our portfolio."
CEO Stephen Elop said that we will be hearing about other Nokia Windows Phones soon, but didn't clarify if he meant those rumored with Mango like the Nokia 900/Ace, or new ones with Apollo.
If we have to wait a year for multicore WP handsets with HD screens, Android high-ends will have pushed the envelope twice by that time - six months seems to be the maximum this market gives you to catch up nowadays.
source: TechRadar
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